Delphine put her thin hand over mine on the kitchen table, and we sat for a long time without saying anything, two old women with a cold pot of coffee and a petition. Then I stood up and put on my yellow church dress again, because I wished to face the Lee County Chancery Clerk in a dress that had never once let me down. “Delphine,” I said, “you drove three hundred miles to tell me the truth. I intend to drive twenty to find out whether it is one.” She picked up her cane. She said she had not brought her good shoes, but she had brought her good sense.
The Chancery Clerk of Lee County was a woman I had taught in the fourth grade, Ashlyn Pegues, who stood up behind her counter the moment I walked in and said, “Miss Mabry. I thought you were at the lake.” She went into the vault herself, in her heels, and came back with a book as big as a tombstone. The Mabry deed of 1888 was on page 214, in faded brown ink. I looked at the name of my great great granddaddy, Josiah Mabry. I looked at the name next to it. It was in a different ink. A bluer ink. A modern ink.
Ashlyn put on her white gloves, and she tilted the page to the window. “Miss Willa,” she said slowly, “this second name was added later. It sits on top of an erasure. You can see where the paper is thin.” The name was Calloway Hale. Everyone in Tupelo over sixty knew that name. Hale s Dry Goods had stood on Main Street for ninety years. The last of the Hales was a Calloway, a bank vice president, who happened to be the husband of my niece Jolene. I took off my glasses. “Ashlyn, who has had this book out in the last two months?”
A forged name on an 1888 deed gave one retired teacher the length of a single weekend to bring her family back to the truth in Tupelo.
I gave my terms to Ashlyn at the counter. She would copy the page, stamp it and keep the original in the vault under lock until a judge asked for it. And on Saturday, the third Saturday in July, a day late and a hundred and twenty chairs short, I would host the Mabry reunion at my farm after all. Every descendant of Josiah who had signed the petition would be invited, by telephone, one by one. Jolene and Calloway would be invited too. Delphine said she would drive back to Chicago on Sunday and not an hour sooner. “I am going to see this,” she said.
They came on Saturday by the carload, forty one signers and more, in their reunion shirts, looking at their shoes. I had borrowed the tables from Lawhon Elementary and the chairs from three churches. Marcus brought the barbecue. The smoke rolled over the pasture, and the guineas ran round the barn. I stood on my porch steps in the yellow dress and the straw hat and read the page from the book, aloud, with Ashlyn beside me, and then I held up the copy where the erasure showed. “Cousins,” I said, “someone altered the deed of our great great granddaddy. I am not going to say who. I am going to let him say it.”
Calloway Hale stepped forward from the back of the crowd, a tall soft man in a salmon colored golf shirt, and he did not deny it. He said that Jolene had found a hole in the old title, and that his family had once held a mortgage on the Mabry land in 1888 which was never recorded. He had thought, he said, that if he added the name, the court might give the Hales a quarter share to sell. Jolene said nothing. She wept. Then Calloway snatched the petition and the copy of the deed from the porch rail, meaning to run to his Lexus and lose them on the highway, and he sprinted across the yard.
He ran for the gate. It was a good plan, but it did not take into account the silver Buick with the Illinois plates. Delphine, eighty five, with her cane across her lap, had driven it through the farm gate at ten that morning and parked it crosswise, with the engine running and the window rolled down. She did not stand up. She did not shout. As Calloway came pounding up the gravel, she reached over and pressed the horn once, a long, flat, patient note, and every Mabry on that lawn turned to look at him.
Calloway stopped with the papers in his fist and his shirt wet with sweat. Delphine looked out of her window at him as she must have looked at a thousand late students in the Chicago school system, with a tired kind eyebrow. “Young man,” she said, “are you going to give that to Willa Mae, or am I going to have to get out of this car?” He gave it to me. He sat down on the grass. Jolene came across the lawn, took her husband s arm and said, in a small voice, to the whole family, “I am so sorry. We got in over our heads.”
In the name of my sister Hattie, who passed in 2020, I started the Hattie Mabry Fund. It pays for title searches, heirs property clinics and legal fees for Black farm families who hold land without clear papers, in Lee, Pontotoc and Itawamba counties. In the first year we cleared the title on twenty nine farms. An old man in Verona, ninety four, who had paid taxes on a hundred acres since 1951 without a deed to his name, signed his new deed on the hood of his truck. He said it was the first paper he ever owned that told the truth.
The Mabry reunion was held on my farm the third Saturday of July, as it has been since 1959. The sixty two tables ran across the whole lawn, and the tent went up at seven, and Leon came at seven sharp with his truck. By nine, the smoke from the barbecue pit was rolling across the pasture, and the little ones were chasing the guineas round the barn. At noon, Delphine said the blessing. At the end of the line stood Jolene, in an apron, with a serving spoon in her hand, handing out banana pudding. I looked at my hundred and twenty chairs. Every one of them was full.
